Comment by Benjammer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Benjammer | Hacker News Reader

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Are you unaware of the concept of a junior engineer working in a company? You realize that not all human code is written by someone with domain expertise, right?

Are you aware that your wording here is implying that you are describing a unique issue with AI code that is not present in human code?

>What would have happened if someone without your domain expertise wasn't reviewing every line and making the changes you mentioned?

So, we're talking about two variables, so four states: human-reviewed, human-not-reviewed, ai-reviewed, ai-not-reviewed.

[non ai]

*human-reviewed*: Humans write code, sometimes humans make mistakes, so we have other humans review the code for things like critical security issues

*human-not-reviewed*: Maybe this is a project with a solo developer and automated testing, but otherwise this seems like a pretty bad idea, right? This is the classic version of "YOLO to production", right?

[with ai]

*ai-reviewed*: AI generates code, sometimes AI hallucinates or gets things very wrong or over-engineers things, so we have humans review all the code for things like critical security issues

*ai-not-reviewed*: AI generates code, YOLO to prod, no human reads it - obviously this is terrible and barely works even for hobby projects with a solo developer and no stakes involved

I'm wondering if the disconnect here is that actual professional programmers are just implicitly talking about going from [human-reviewed] to [ai-reviewed], assuming nobody in their right mind would just _skip code reviews_. The median professional software team would never build software without code reviews, imo.

But are you thinking about this as going from [human-reviewed] straight to [ai-not-reviewed]? Or are you thinking about [human-not-reviewed] code for some reason? I guess it's not clear why you immediately latch onto the problems with [ai-not-reviewed] and seem to refuse to acknowledge the validity of the state [ai-reviewed] as being something that's possible?

It's just really unclear why you are jumping straight to concerns like this without any nuance for how the existing industry works regarding similar problems before we used AI at all.

It appears that you are jumping on posts by people who aren't an LLM advocate. My interest in debating a topic with someone who is anything approaching a zealot is near zero, but I will say this:

Yes, junior developers exist. They generally consume more resources than they produce in value, with the hope that they will become productive at some later point. LLMs do not appear to be capable of crossing that threshold at scale, and even if they are, there is a clear cost/benefit tradeoff that can be performed with respect to a senior developer's time, the amount of improvement an LLM can derive from that time, and the value of that improvement to the organization when compared to letting others shoulder that expense.

People skip code reviews all the time, where making a cursory, inadequate effort still can be considered skipping it. I agree a professional development team doesn't skip code reviews of their own code, but few people perform any meaningful review of dependencies.

That said, having people review large amounts of AI-generated code is plausibly (and practically in my experience and in some limited studies) worse than having no AI involvement. People aren't refusing to acknowledge the "ai-reviewed" state, they are pushing back on people (you seem to be one of them) who advocate for that state as some sort of solution to the problem LLMs create (cranking out intern/junior quality code at a rate competent humans struggle to keep up with).

Also, we are seeing more and more examples of "ai-not-reviewed" projects being released and used because non-developers are publishing the output from LLM coding assistants/agents.

You seem to be the one struggling with context, nuance, and implicit assumptions, given that almost everyone seems to be on the same page and you are the one who is confused.

In short, people are talking about the issues with "ai-reviewed" and "ai-not-reviewed", and focusing more on the "ai-reviewed" portion because the "ai-not-reviewed" issues are obvious as you stated. You just don't seem to get them for some reason.

> Yes, junior developers exist. They generally consume more resources than they produce in value, with the hope that they will become productive at some later point.

I think this misrepresents the situation. Junior devs are not loss leading normal-devs-in-training, otherwise they wouldn’t be hired.

Junior devs are hired for potential, not current productivity. There's a reason they are mostly hired by very large organizations.

How many junior devs does it take to produce the same amount of production code as a senior dev? And how much of a senior dev's time do they consume while doing that?

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